我要飞Faye

Well, so much for being dilligent and studying Japanese weekly! It was more of 3 weeks of intensive study and another few weeks of on and off Japanese grammar.

What prompted an actual update was my borrowing of Mangajin's Basic Japanese through comics, which is an attempt to show how comics could be used to learn Japanese. The format of the book is pretty simple, covering politeness levels, hiragana, why sometimes kanji is not pronounced the way you would expect, and some basic terms that one inevitably stumbles upon in comics. The main focus is on the basic terms like sumimasen and how it varies with context, e.g. in the example I stated there are varying shades of excuse me and thank you. What's neat about this book is that it even goes into colloquialisms and related words. There's even English translations both literally and in a coherent sentence to help match words to context. Definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to figure out Japanese.

I'm glad to note that some of the Japanese grammar rules seems to have paid off, even though I still have some difficulty with verbs in hiiragana and what on earth they mean (ironically, I function better with kanji because they share some, though not identical, meanings with Chinese). Here's hoping I can make some headway???

Japanese aside, I am enjoying the look and feel of Dreamwidth more and more. Perhaps I should go hunting for more communities to hang out in on dw?